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It's always going to be a balsa (wood, I guess, since you can actually use any kind). Whether or not it's bridge, boom, tower, whatever, there's always a wood-and-glue event.

Keeping with bridge, you can set requirements on the shape, such as this is Elevated Bridge so you have to have the standard minimum clearance. They could make it a regular bridge, etc, but the ideas are still the same.

They'll no doubt change the specs as far as sizes go, but you'll learn from building to this year's. The concepts you learn don't change. Even if the event were to change to boomilever or tower building, you'd still have a better understanding going in.

My bad first year with Boomilever taught me a lot that I used for bridge this year.

if it wasnt a wood event...teams would use metal. if it wasnt specifically wood there would definitely be unfair advantages. fortunately it will always be wood.

I really hope they don't go to 3 load points - and I have a feeling they won't. This year, bridges are only just starting to become competitive. Changing the rules to require three possible load points requires a complete paradigm shift in terms of design. Between years for boom, all that was changed (if I remember correctly) was that the load became a little bit harder (max height shrunk and maybe distance from wall increased? I didn't do it, so I don't know exactly). With towers, it was a fairly big change - moving to the crimped tower. With towers though, I know all of the designs with the regular tower had basically become the same, so it made sense to change it a lot. Same with going to three possibilities for loading with original bridge building - people hadn't quite figured it out. With Boom, people hadn't gotten all that good at it, so they were able to change it.

EB is, I think, a really great event. I have a feeling, come nationals, we'll see a lot of different successful designs. Even at the very top, I don't think the designs will be all too similar. There may be some common themes, but I would bet there are some significant differences between all of the top 5 or 10 bridges at nationals. To me, this means that next year's rules shouldn't need a massive change (such as going to 3 load points) and will need just a small tweak in parameters (though this year's are so challenging I don't know how it could be made all that much harder while still being within reason), especially since I think that, on the whole, the country isn't all that good at building Elevated Bridges yet.

We'll see!

What is triple loading?

See pages 100-101. =).

We discussed it a little earlier. Nejanimb was explaining the past rules. Triple loading is where there are 3 possible loading points, the right, middle, and the left. At comp, the ES chooses any one of the 3 load points to place the loading block on. Nejanimb put a picture of one of his old Triple Load bridges in the Image Gallery.

Hmm, that sounds interesting. I would suggest making the maximum load heavier.

Has there been a year when the load has not been 15kg? It'd be an interesting idea.

Its been 15 kg since 2000; don't know before that.

One significant change that did get made after that was switching to straight efficiency for scoring. Before, Tier 1 was all structures that held 15kg; those that didn't were put in Tier 2.

15 kg seems the most reasonable. Too much over that and the bucket woudn't be big enough to hold all that sand. Less than that and the bridges would use extremly less dense wood.